The best of the web: technology sites Mashable, Wired, Pinterest honored with Webby Awards

Influential technology sites including Mashable, Wired, the Khan Academy, Facebook and Pinterest were among the recipients of this year’s coveted Webby Awards.

The Webby Awards is an international prize presented to high-quality websites deemed to be the best of the web for the year.

Technology blog Mashable won the award for the Best Business Blog beating off rivals such as TechCrunch and HuffPost Business. Forward-thinking technology trends magazine Wired came out ahead of National Geographic Magazine Online, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and TheAtlantic.com in the Magazine category.

Content sharing website of the moment, Pinterest, was the winner of the Social Media Webby while Google’s new social network Google+ was the People’s Voice favorite.

Facebook’s recently acquired photo sharing app Instagram received the Webby Breakout of the Year Special Achievement Award. Leading social network Facebook was presented with the People’s Special Achievement for Social Change Award.

The award for the best Consumer Electronics Website was presented to headphone manufacturer Urbanears whose colorful and easy-to-navigate site makes shopping for headphones (almost) as enjoyable as listening to music with them. Smartphone manufacturer HTC picked up the People’s Voice Award for its HTC Sense site in the Consumer Electronics category.

The website of Chinese mobile manufacturer Huawei Mobiles was deemed the best Telecommunications site for the year while Nokia’s Swipe site proved to be popular with consumers.

Online learning portal The Khan Academy -- a site which offers over 3,000 free educational videos and lessons on subjects ranging from science to history -- was selected as the best education site on the web.

Non-profit organization TED was rewarded with the People’s Voice award in the same category and picked up the Webby Award for Radio/Podcasts. TED.com is packed full of inspirational talks by extrodinary people that can be viewed online.

Cloud storage service Dropbox picked up both the Webby Award and the People’s Voice Award for Best Web Services & Applications, beating online video editing service Animoto, live video streaming service Livestream, online event organization service Eventbrite and ticket search engine SeatGeek. Dropbox also won the Best Practices Webby.

On the stranger side of the web, the blog “I Found Money Today” picked up the Webby Award for the category of Weird. The site brands itself as “a social experiment in anonymous giving” and documents George Resch’s adventures as he leaves money around the city for people to find in the hope that it will change their day.

Honorees will be presented with their awards on May 21 at a gala event at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. The ceremony will be broadcast live on the web and via the Webby Awards App.